Tell Me Everything

Strout finally puts Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge in the same room, in the same coastal Maine town, and lets two of her most durable characters simply talk, about unrecorded lives, about what any life amounts to, without forcing them into a conventional plot. The novel's structure of loosely braided conversations and small-town incident, including a subplot involving a possible crime that never quite dominates, only works because Strout trusts silence and repetition to do the emotional work rather than incident. Reviewers responded to the novel's mood over its momentum, describing its effect as closer to an ambient, accumulating warmth than a driven narrative, which tracks with how Strout has always treated plot as secondary to the texture of ordinary disclosure between people who've earned each other's trust.